As a creator of experiences, I face this challenge on a daily basis. How do I get audiences to perceive manufactured, or “not real” offerings as authentic and therefore worth their time and money or even better, transform their view of a brand?

Empathize. You have to know your audience. Walk a mile in their shoes and you’ll start to scratch the surface of their reality. My wife is the Executive Director of Girl Talk Theatre, a non-profit theatre company that gives a voice to marginalized women in Boston. Through her genuine offering of their stories, I have experienced a new empathy for a population I previously knew nothing about. Find ways to experience the lives of the people you are trying to reach.

Plan, plan and then plan some more. Spend time up front making sure you create something that matches both the needs of your audience with the objectives of the brand. My mom had a great love of puzzles and I remember spending hours with her over the dining room table looking for that perfect piece to build the image. Planning an experience is like finding that missing puzzle piece. The shape on one side represents your audience’s needs and the shape on the other side represents the brand’s objectives. The perfect experience is like the missing puzzle piece joining both sides.

Get some REAL perspective. Step back and look at your work, not to congratulate but with a truly critical eye. Really see your offering through the eyes of your audience. Is it gimmiky, fake or cheesy (to use my 12-year old daughter’s favorite adjective)? Or does if feel genuine? What could make it more so?

In the end, the experiences we all create are fake, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” because they’re made up. But if crafted correctly, they can be perceived as “such stuff as dreams are made on”. So I dare you to do the work it takes to get real when you create an experience. It’ll change your life and maybe a few others in the process.

Mark_Snell@jackmorton.com

I always enjoy hearing stories about what inspires creative people, and the journey they've taken to arrive at their destination. What influenced them at an early age so that it remains prominent in their work today? As Steve Jobs once said: "You can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards."

The Creative 30 is an online talent competition to find the best UK-based creatives from all disciplines. You can learn about these accomplished people through videos on the site, and vote for your favorites.

So the right man won. And I don’t mean that out of any sense of ideology (although I was an Obama supporter). I mean it from the point of a marketer and an observer of political strategy and campaign execution.

More than any candidate in modern times, Barack Obama made people want to join his club, his movement. He energized voters and supporters alike, blurring the lines between the two groups (like any good 360-degree brand should these days) and inspiring a following and fervor the like of which I have never seen for a politician. He kept his head up, addressing big issues with big picture thinking and high-flown rhetoric. He made people believe. He created a tribe. He defined an era.

As a result, Obama didn’t have to play cynical electoral mathematics, didn’t had to go wildly negative, didn’t have to try to wedge his opponent into a corner, didn’t have to dumb-down his message, and didn’t have to resort to detailed interest-group policymaking to make his points.
There's simply no one working in politics, communications, marketing, brand, business, or anywhere else who can't draw lessons from what Obama and his campaign team achieved.

Here are just four quick lessons…

Continue reading "Lessons from Obama"

My colleague in Australia, Matt Jones, wrote a great post about some of the exciting work they've been doing with [yellow tail] this summer. Next up, [yellow tail] summer sample sessions in Australia.

Surely the Internet age is a Renaissance for map-making... a Golden Age of cartographers... modeled not so much in the style of the brash adventurers of centuries past, who made maps as they explored the unknown... but rather pragmatic philosophers who show us all how to look at what we already know, so that we may experience it in new--and totally amazing--ways.

Like my neighborhood--thanks to NYCityMap, a layering of information I know (subway, green market) with information I don't know (every wifi hotspot, census info) created by the city's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications.
There's Google's flu map--so simple, so brilliant--which charts flu-related keyword searches ("flu symptoms," "flu medicine") to track flu trends in the US, providing a service to benefit public health.
And then there are the maps of the blogosphere and the communities and connections that power it. My favorite--Morningside Analytics' "Shifting the Debate" project from the '08 election cycle, makes the leap forward of not just counting how many people were viewing and referring to You Tube videos but qualifying their fit within ideological communities.

We hope you'll take a mo' to give us your feedback on the new jackmorton.com, an experience by Jack Morton's own Brand Marketing and Digital teams that we're mightily proud of for reasons both brand (it's Jack 2.0) and tech (all Flash, SEO site, viewable on mobile devices). Just add your comment to this post.

PS We had a lot of fun building this site for our own brand (almost as much as we love building sites for our clients) with a team straddling New York, London, Boston and LA.

I read a very positive review in this morning's SF Chronicle Business Section, touting RIM's new BlackBerry Storm, a touch screen offering that challenges the iPhone. This kind of new product news has, in the past, really dominated the press coverage in San Francisco, a city that loves its technology. But today, this news is just a sidebar -- figuratively and literally -- to other headlines: The case for Chapter 11 for the automakers; Stocks hit 5-year low point; Area home prices plummet 40%.

Usually when you launch a product, you worry that your marketing message will get lost in all of the other marketing noise. This is a very different environment, where you're worried that your message is just irrelevant. You worry about offending your target consumers by being insensitive to their economic challenges.

I heard a radio ad a couple of days ago promoting ski season at one of the resorts in Tahoe. The message was essentially "yeah, you know you probably can't afford it, but are you going to let all this trouble get in the way of doing what you really love?" I guess that might work for anyone not worried about their job, or not responsible for a family, or feeling good about their retirement savings -- that's a pretty narrow target, not well served by broadcast advertising.

The fact is that brands can change their messaging a lot faster than they can change what the brand stands for, and that can lead to messaging that isn't authentic. In this economy, some brands just aren't relevant to the masses. Product development cycles are too long to quickly respond to the needs of this economy (can they really turn around GM, Ford and Chrysler in time?)

I'm interested in your comments.